Arab TV Guide

The fruits of state-run media: Conspiracy theories, paranoia

November 17, 2002|By Frida Ghitis. Frida Ghitis writes about international affairs. She is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television."

Now that the Muslim holy month of Ramadan has started, television audiences in the world's largest Arab country are spending their customary countless hours in front of the television, since they can't work. This year, they are enjoying a new treat, a blockbuster series based on the world's foremost textbook of anti-Semitism, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The television "documentary" will explain how, exactly, Jews plan to take over the world.

The captivating tale of international intrigue fits nicely with the pervading views found in today's Arab world, presenting the United States, Israel and Jews in general--often with the help of Britain--as the perpetrators of the most unspeakable and sinister acts. This view of the world in which an endless list of conspiracy theories explains everything the naked eye cannot see has millions of adherents in all corners of the vast Muslim and Arab worlds.

No matter how many times Osama bin Laden boasts of Al Qaeda's spectacular Sept. 11 success, millions of his supporters around the world hold fast to their belief that the "CIA and the Jews" did it.

It is easy to predict where adherents of such theories live. The willingness to believe outlandish explanations, particularly those ascribing sinister omnipotence to Americans and Jews, closely matches the gaping holes in freedom of the press around the world. According to the latest press survey by Freedom House, of 46 countries where the majority of the population is Muslim, only one, Mali, has a free press.

And wherever a government leans on the press, the lack of objective sources leaves the public unable to glean the truth out of the swirling dust of neighborhood gossip. It is no accident that even some of the most educated people in the Muslim world still believe that Jews stayed away from their World Trade Center offices on Sept. 11.

Among Muslim-majority countries, Arab ones stand out as having some of the most restrictive press and some of the most anti-Semitic beliefs. Not long ago, Arabs liked to point out that they had nothing against Jews.

Their quarrel was with Zionists--the Jews of Israel and their supporters. No longer. The same soil that has proved so fertile for dictators has also grown a bumper harvest of anti-Semitism whose likes the world has not seen since the days of the Third Reich.

The link between press restrictions and the inability to see through absurd explanations of world events is rather simple: When you know you can't believe what you read, anything at all could be true. Those who live in countries where the government controls the press have a keen sense of disbelief.

They know that newspaper stories are written with the government's agenda in mind. They know truth is not the top priority. As a result, they have to look elsewhere for the facts.

During the days of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Western journalists in Havana often faced questions from Cubans wanting to know what was really going on in the U.S. They had learned to distrust what they read in the government-controlled press, so the story they were hearing about a president about to lose his job over an extramarital affair sounded like just the kind of fabrication they had learned not to believe. There had to be another explanation.

In countries with repressive governments, the explanations come from the few people who enjoy the freedom to talk. Because in much of the Arab and the Muslim world the local mosque may be the only place where one can talk about politics, the worldviews of imams and mullahs can spread like sand in a desert storm.

Because the U.S. is a close friend of several Middle Eastern regimes, anti-Americanism is often veiled. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is served with all the subtlety of poison gas in a Nazi death chamber.

The archives of the Middle East Media Research Institute, for example, include articles such as one from the Saudi Arabian state-controlled newspaper Al Riyadh, detailing the Jews' use of non-Jewish human blood in their holiday celebrations, a retelling of one of the classic anti-Semitic libels.

In Egypt, which gets billions in U.S. aid, a government-sponsored scientific journal describes a mysterious hemorrhagic illness brought to Afghanistan during the U.S. bombing, suggesting that American bioweapons were deliberately tested on Afghan civilians with horrifying results. If you believe these stories, bin Laden begins to sound reasonable.

The Egyptian television series shown this Ramadan, "Horseman Without a Horse," draws liberally from the "Protocols," a book in which Jews plot to take over the world. It has been established as a 19th Century forgery, but the material was used by Nazi Germany and other European governments in the propaganda campaigns that culminated with the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II.